Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/816

792 792 INDIA [HISTORY. south Gan-es By the Burmese tha Ahams have been completely crushed as a dominant race, and their national priests, to the number of 179,000, have been forced to till the soil to gain their living. But the people of Assam are still so essen tially made up of aboriginal races and their Hinduized descendants that not 65,000 persons of even alleged pure Aryan descent can be found in a population exceeding 4 millions. Non- We have hitherto confined our survey to the country on Aryans the north of the Ganges. If we pass to the southern Gangetic plain, we find that almost every tract has tradi- t ons ^ a non -Aryan tribe, either as a once dominant race or as lying at the root of the local population. The great division of Bundelkhand contains several crushed peoples of this class, and takes its name from the Bundelas, a tribe of at least semi-aboriginal descent. As we rise from the Gangetic plain into the highlands of the Central Provinces, we reach the abiding home of the non-Aryan tribes. One such race after another Gaulis, Ndgas, Gouds, Ahirs ruled from the Satpura plateau. If we turn to the lower provinces of Bengal we find the delta peopled by masses of non-Aryan origin. One section of them has merged into low-caste Hindus ; another section has sought a more equal social organization by accepting the creed of Mahomet. But such changes of faith do not alter their ethnical type ; and the Musalman of the delta differs as widely in race from the Afghan as the low-caste Hindu of the delta differs from the Brahman. Throughout southern India the non-Aryan elements make up almost the entire population, and have supplied the great Dravidian family of languages, spoken by 46 millions of people. Mahometan Period. At the very time that Buddhism was being crusned out of India by the Bnihmanic reaction, a new faith was being born in Arabia, destined to supply a youthful fanaticism which should sweep the country from the Himalayas to Cape .Cotnorin, and from the western to the eastern sea. Muhammad, commonly knovn as Mahomet, the founder of Islam, died at Medina in 632 A.D., while the Chinese Mahome- pilgrim Hwen Tsang was still on his travels. The first tan in- Mahometan invasion of India is placed in 664, only thirty- )11S- two years after the death of the prophet. The Punjab is said to have been ravaged on this occasion with no per manent results. The first Mahometan conquest was the outlying province of Sind, which from the point of view of geology may be regarded as a continuation of the desert of Baluchistan. In 711, or seventy-nine years after the death of Mahomet, an Arab army under Muhammad Kasim invaded and conquered the Hindus of Sind in the name of Walid I., caliph of Damascus, of the Bene-Umyyeh line. In the same year Roderic, the last of the Goths, fell before the victorious Saracens in Spain. Bat in India the bravery of the Rajputs and the devotion of the Brahmans seem to have afforded a stronger national bulwark than existed in western Europe. In 750 the Hindus rose in rebellion and drove out the Musalman tyrant, and the land had rest for one hundred and fifty years. Mahmu l The next Mahometan invasion of India is associated with the name of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni. Mahmud was Gnazm. ^ Q eldest son of Sabuktagin, surnamed Nasr-ud-din, in origin a Turkish slave, who had established his rule over the greater part of modern Afghanistan and Khorasan with Ghazni as his capital. In 977 Sabuktagfn is said to have defeated Jaipal, the Hindu raj A of Lahore, and to have rendered the Punjab tributary. But his son Mahmud was the first of the great Musalman conquerors whose names still ring through Asia. Mahmud succeeded to the throne in 997. During his reign of thirty-three years he extended the limits of his father s kingdom from Persia on the east to the Ganges on the west ; and it is related that he led his armies into the plains of India no less than seventeen times. In 1001 he defeated Raj A Jaipal a second time, and took him prisoner. But Anandpal, the son of Jaipal, raised again the standard of national independence, and gathered an army of Rajput allies from the furthest corners of Hindustan. The decisive battle was fought in the valley of Peshawar. Mahmud won the day by the aid of his Turkish horsemen, and thenceforth the Punjab has been a Mahometan province, except during the brief period of Sikh supremacy. The most famous of Mahmud s invasions of India was that undertaken in 1024 against Guzerat. The goal of this expedition was the temple dedicated to Siva at Sonmath, around which so many legends have gathered. It is reported that Mahmud marched through Ajmir, to avoid the desert of Sind; that he found the Hindus gathered on the neck of the peninsula of Somnath in defence of their holy city; that the battle lasted for two days; that in the end the Rajput warriors fled to their boats, while the Brahman priests retired into the inmost shrine ; that Mahmud, introduced into this shrine, rejected all entreaties by the Bralimans to spare their idol, and all offers of ransom ; that he smote the image with his club, and forthwith a fountain of precious stones gushed out. Until the British invasion of Afghanistan in 1839, the club of Mahrnud and the sandal-woocl gates of Somnath were preserved at the tomb of the great conqueror near Ghazni. The club has now disappeared, and the gates carried back to India by General Nott are recognized to be a clumsy forgery. To Mahometans Mahmud is known, not only as a champion of the faith, but as a munificent patron of literature. The dynasty that he founded was not long-lived. Fourteen of his descendants occupied his throne within little more than a century, but none of them achieved greatness. A blood- feud arose between them and a line of Afghan princes who had established themselves among the mountains of Ghor. In 1152 Bahrain, the last of the Ghaznivide Turks, was overthrown by Allah-ud-din of Ghor, and the wealthy and populous city of Ghazni was razed to the ground. But even the Ghoride conqueror spared the tomb of Mahmud. Khusru, the son of Bahrain, fled to Lahore, and there established the first Mahometan dynasty within India. It speedily ended with his son, also called Khusru, whom Muhammad Ghori, the relentless enemy of the Ghaznivide house, carried away into captivity in 1186. The Afghans of Ghor or Ghur thus rose to power on the downfall of the Turks of Ghazni. The founder of the family is said to have been Izzud-din al Husain, whose son Allah-ud-din destroyed Ghazni, as already mentioned. Allah-ud-din had two nephews, Ghiyas-ud-din and Muiz- ud-din, the latter of whom, also called Shahab-ud-din by Musalman chroniclers, and generally known in history as Muhammad Ghori, is the second of the great Mahometan conquerors of India. In 1176 he took Multdn and Uchch ; in 1187 Lahore fell into his hands; in 1191 he was repulsed before Delhi, but soon afterwards he redeemed this disaster. Hindustan Proper was at that period divided between the two Rajput kingdoms of Kanauj and Delhi. Muhammad Ghori achieved his object by playing off the rival kings against each other. By 1193 he had extended his conquests as far east as Benares, and the defeated Riijputs migrated in a body to the hills and deserts now known as Rajputana. In 1199 one of his lieutenants, named Bakhtiyar, advanced into Bengal, and expelled by an audacious stratagem the last Hindu raja of Nadiya, The entire northern plain, from the Indus to the Brahmaputra, thus lay under the Mahometan yoke. But Muhammad Ghori never settled himself permanently in India. His favourite residence is said to have been the old capital of Ghazni, while he governed his Indian conquests through the agency